Comic-Con, Here We Come! Make a Life-Size Warhammer Space Marine Suit

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Comic-Con, Here We Come! Make a Life-Size Warhammer Space Marine Suit

The costumes are 840 percent larger than the game piece.

Photos: Games Workshop/Instructables

The hugely popular tabletop game Warhammer 40K is set in the far future and played with 28mm miniature figures. In preparation for Comic-Con, a few fanboys decided to supersize these little Space Marines and built 7-foot-tall, wearable replicas of their armor. Want to make your own? Go for it! It only takes 352 "terribly complicated" steps.

Step one: Join the "Obscurus Crusade," an entire forum devoted to creating costumes based on the game's Space Marines, Orks, and Tyranids. Or, for those not quite ready to enlist in the intergalactic army, creator Shawn Thorsson has provided an overview of his process at Instructables.

Designing the Armor
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The first challenge in creating a life-size Space Marine is accounting for the difference in size. These iron giants are a couple feet taller than most normal people and that requires some design translation. People wearing the costumes have to walk on stilts and use arm extenders to make the proportions work and models need to be built around that.

Photos, line art, and a software package called Pepakura help work out the design kinks.

Photos: Instructables

Metal Armor, Made From Paper
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Using a slick software package called Pepakura, cosplayers can pull 3-D data from videogames and turn those files into paper models. Once the paper is cut and folded, it is reinforced with fiberglass to give it strength for the next step.

The armor starts out as cut and folded paper, gets covered with resin, then is sculpted using power tools.

Photos: Instructables

Molten Plastic
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With fiberglass models made, the space marine recruits can create multiple copies of the armor through a process called vacuum forming. Using this technique, a thin sheet of plastic is heated and pulled over a shape using a vacuum, leaving a near-perfect replica of the original.

In order to scale up production, the paper/resin models are copied with vacuum formed plastic.

Photo: Instructables

Many Parts, Many Processes
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Not every part of the costume could be built the same way. The helmets were very complex and required the designers to use a casting process. Once the base models were completed, they were customized in the painting and decoration phase.

The helmet provides much of the costume's personality and each one is slightly different.

Photo: Instructables

"I Love It When a Plan Comes Together"
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After months of hard work the final costume started coming together. With a little paint and polish, these space marines looked ready to fight whatever baddies Emperor Zurg could throw at them. The costumes stole the show at Maker Faire 2012, and will likely wow even the most jaded Comic-Conner.

Honor and glory await any brave recruits willing to trudge through the 352 steps that take three-and-a-half months to complete. But be warned: This is not a project for the faint of heart. In order to enlist in the Space Marines you'll need to brave sharp blades, horrible heat, and noxious chemicals.

Or, you could just drop by San Diego's Comic-Con, marvel at the armor, then head over to the food truck corral.